Review : The Pianist

Film Director Norman Polanski
By Carl DeVasto

Country Gazette Arts & Lifestyle

September 10, 2004

On DVD and Videocassette

The content of this accomplished picture is so unrelentingly horrible that many people simply shouldn't see it. It's a fact of human nature that human sensibilities vary, and if you are hyper-sensitive to violence, perhaps there's no point in your becoming ill in order to experience a work of art - and ill you will become!

For the rest of us - we of stronger stomach and thicker skin (coarsened taste?) - "The Pianist" is a must, a significant addition to Holocaust art, another worthy meditation on evil. Such darkness has always been Polanski's domain ("Knife in the Water," "Macbeth," "Chinatown," "Death and the Maiden"), and he has a right to hold forth because he was a child in Poland during the Nazi interval and lost family members in the Holocaust.

"The Pianist" is based on a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a brilliant Jewish Polish pianist who was a young man when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. For a few years, Szpilman, his family, and thousands of other Jews in the Warsaw area endured the restrictions and insults foisted on them be the Nazis. But by 1942 (the height of the Second World War), Polish Jews had to withstand more than privation and humiliation. It was now a matter of basic survival.

The Nazis trammeled Jews in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, shipped many to the death camps, and simply killed them on the spot if they were the least bit troublesome. Once an honored and privileged musician, Szpilman (Adrian Brody) became a servile menial and then a virtual animal as he managed to survive until the Russians liberated Warsaw by early 1945. This is Szpilman's perseverance story as filtered through the piercing lens of Polanski. It's a human earthquake.

Only for Some

This international picture has already garnered awards and is one more film that makes us realize that World War II was probably the pivotal, crucial event in all of modern history. Polanski (like Steven Spielberg in "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan") graphically images so many human dimensions: sadism, vulnerability, irrationality, creativity, endurance. Some of his depictions have been encountered before, and the film is a bit long at 2:25. But for the rest, "The Pianist" is riveting for those (again) who can take it.

Brody's performance struck me as impassive and rather "one note" during the beginning of the piece. But gradually, his stolid, almost dazed demeanor became very real, a way Szpilman must have responded to the negative events that piled on year after year. He and his family are evicted, then they are sent to die at one of the annihilation camps, then he is beaten, starved, and left alone in the ruins of the decimated Ghetto. Brody is just mesmerizing as he shows a gifted and fortunate man turn into a hunted rat.

The music that Polanski offers as an antidote to the pervasive horror is gorgeous. That there isn't much of it on hand is thematic. But Szpilman stays alive (and heartens others) by occasionally playing Mozart, Beethoven, and especially Chopin (the greatest of Polish composers). The real Szpilman dies at 88 in 2000, so he didn't get to see Polanski's version of the darkest period in his life. But he would have approved, I think, of this brutal, honest, beautiful work.

Reviewed by Carl DeVasto